My mother’s anxiety about Dr. Combe’s age reminds me that my intimacy with my cousin, Harry Siddons, who was now visiting his mother previous to his departure for India to begin his military career, had been a subject of considerable perplexity to her while I was still at home and he used to come from Addiscombe to see us.  Nothing could be more diametrically opposite than his mother’s and my mother’s system (if either could be called so) of dealing with the difficulty, though I have my doubts whether Mrs. Harry perceived any in the case; and whereas I think my mother’s apprehensions and precautions would have very probably been finally justified by some childish engagement between Harry and myself, resulting in all sorts of difficulties and complications as time went on and absence and distance produced their salutary effect on a boy of twenty and a girl of seventeen, Mrs. Harry remained passive, and apparently unconscious of any danger; and we walked and talked and danced and were sentimental together after the most approved cousinly fashion, and Harry went off to India with my name engraved upon his sword—­a circumstance which was only made known to me years after by his widow (his and my cousin, Harriet Siddons), whom he met and loved and married in India, and who made me laugh, telling me how hard he and she had worked, scratched, and scrubbed together to try and efface my name from the good sword; which, however, being true steel, and not inconstant heart of man, refused to give up its dedication.  I should have much objected to any such inscription had I been consulted.

My cousin Harry’s wife was the second daughter of George Siddons, Mrs. Siddons’s eldest son, who through her interest was appointed, while still quite a young man, to the influential and lucrative post of collector of the port at Calcutta, which position he retained for nearly forty years.  He married a lady in whose veins ran the blood of the kings of Delhi, and in whose descendants, in one or two instances, even in the fourth generation, this ancestry reveals itself by a type of beauty of strikingly Oriental character.  Among these is the beautiful Mrs. Scott-Siddons, whose exquisite features present the most perfect living miniature of her great-grandmother’s majestic beauty.  In two curiously minute, highly finished miniatures of the royal Hindoo personages, her ancestors, which Mrs. George Siddons gave Miss Twiss (and the latter gave me), it is wonderful how strong a likeness may be traced to several of their remote descendants born in England of English parents.

To return to Edinburgh:  another intimate acquaintance, or rather friend, of Mr. Combe’s whom I frequently met at his house was Duncan McLaren, father of the present member of Parliament, the able editor of the Scotsman.  Between him and the Combes all matters of public interest and importance were discussed from the most liberal and enlightened point of view, and it was undoubtedly a great advantage to an intelligent